Conventionally, a part placement method has been proposed in order to efficiently produce multiple types of boards by a mounting line having a great number of mounters, each of which mounts electronic components (hereinafter, referred to as parts) on a board, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 7-22774, for example. By this conventional part placement method, parts to be mounted on all of the multiple types of boards (hereinafter, referred to as “common parts”) are grouped in an order of user frequency and in an order of speeds, thereby deciding a placement position of a part feeder for the common parts. Thereby, it becomes no longer necessary to prepare each part feeder of the common parts for each board, to be set in a part supplying unit in the mounter. Accordingly, it is possible to reduce the number of times of interchanging the feeders when a type of the board is to be changed, thereby efficiently producing the board.
However, if there are a great number of types of boards, due to constraints on the number of part feeders which are able to be stored in the mounter, all of the part feeders are not always able to be stored in the mounter. Whether or not all of the part feeders can be stored is unknown until processing for deciding placement of the part feeder is performed. More specifically, if the placement of all of the part feeders can be decided, all of the part feeders can be stored in the mounter, and if not, some of the part feeders are not able to be stored in the mounter.
However, this processing is quite time consuming. For example, in order to facilitate operations performed by an operator to place the part feeders in the part supplying unit, various processing is necessary, such as processing for grouping parts which have a similar size or shape, and processing for deciding an order of the placement of the part feeders in order to minimize a mounting time for each board type in the same group. Moreover, those processing need to be performed in trial-and-error processes. For this reason, a lot of time is required to know whether or not all part feeders can be stored in the mounter, and if some part feeders cannot be stored in the mounter, a production schedule of boards is modified, for example by reducing the number of board types to be produced, in order to re-perform the processing for deciding the placement positions of the part feeders. Therefore, there is a problem that a quite lot of time is required to decide a production schedule of boards.
The present invention is conceived to solve the above problem, and an object of the present invention is to provide a production condition determining method by which placement of the part feeders can be decided in a short time, by judging at an early stage whether or not the part feeders can be stored in the part supplying unit, and by adopting an interactive system for communicating with an operator.